Sun, 06 Apr 2008 12:05:14 GMT

Magnesium Nanoblades

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created tiny nanoblades made out of magnesium. They used oblique angle deposition, which was previously thought to always create cylindrical structures like nanorods or nanosprings.

These blades are practically two-dimensional, with a thickness of only 15 nanometers. Now the researchers are looking for ways to coat these nanoblades with metallic catalysts so they can be used as high-density storage for hydrogen fuel cells. Posted by: Michael Anissimov      Read more     Source

April 1, 2008, 10:19 PM CT

Electricity and gas consumption at a glance

People who want to save energy should always keep an eye on their consumption. The EWE Box offers customers a neat solution: It enables private households to monitor their electricity and gas consumption whenever they want - and save costs thanks to new pricing models.

Once a year, someone from the electricity or gas works comes to read the meter. Soon afterwards, the customer receives an invoice listing the power consumption for the whole year. It does not reveal precisely how much energy the customer has used at what times or with which devices. This has been the situation in the past. In future, however, private households will always be able to check their power consumption - at all times of the day and night.

With the support of the Fraunhofer Application Center System Technology AST, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE have developed a new solution in collaboration with Oldenburg-based energy provider EWE. It enables customers to keep track of their current electricity and gas consumption at all times. "The days of 'stupid' meters are over," says ISE project manager Dr. Harald Schäffler. The new metering technologies are intelligent: "The EWE Box is an innovative communication gateway that records and saves the readings from the electricity and gas meters and transmits them to a control center via DSL." This metering and display method - known by experts as 'smart metering' - has a particular advantage: "The power provider can offer the customer individual pricing models, depending on factors such as the load, the time of day or the time of year," explains Schäffler. A different price rate could apply in summer, for instance, when little heating is required, than in winter......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

April 1, 2008, 9:07 PM CT

Is it a bird, is it a plane, no it's a bridge!

A government lab in Teddington has taken on its biggest sample for analysis to date a 14 tonne foot-bridge.

The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is a world-leading centre of excellence in developing and applying the most accurate measurement standards, science and technology. For over 100 years it has been the UKs National Measurement Institute and provides highly accurate measurement and analysis for public and private sector benefit alike.

The "sample" was a 14 tonne footbridge that is 20 metres long and 5 metres high and has been used to allow access from one side of the NPL site to the other for the last 46 years. With redevelopment of the NPL site this bridge has become redundant. Rather than demolish the bridge, and in the spirit of recycling, NPL researchers have used this unique opportunity to run a project using the old bridge to improve civil engineering structures.

Before this could begin the small matter of needing to move the massive bridge across the site away from the demolition zone needed to be addressed. Moving such a structure is unusual and was expertly carried out by Burton Smith and Beck and Pollitzer who used a 250 tonne capacity crane that extended nearly 50 metres into the sky.

After lifting the bridge it was then trailered across the NPL site, with essential co-operation from LGC, taking an hour to travel the quarter mile earlier this year, squeezing around tight turns and under trees before being lifted above existing buildings to its final resting place......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

April 1, 2008, 8:28 PM CT

Small is Big During NanoDays

April 2008 witnesses the launch of two efforts--with major funding from the National Science Foundation--that are intended to promote understanding of nanotechnology among the general public. Nanotechnology is the art and science of manipulating matter at the nanoscale (down to 1/100,000 the width of a human hair) to create new and unique materials and products. It is also the subject of "Nanotechnology: The Power of Small," a three-part, in-depth Fred Friendly Seminars series, airing on public television beginning this month; and NanoDays, a nationwide offering of educational programs about nanoscale science and engineering and its potential impacts.

"Nanotechnology: The Power of Small" brings together policymakers, scientists, journalists and community leaders to explore the promises and problems of this new technology. Guided by John Hockenberry, public radio news anchor and former NBC News correspondent, panelists wrestle with the benefits and risks of nanotechnology in three one-hour programs devoted to the issues of privacy, health and the environment. In "Watching You. Watching Me," panelists explore such questions as whether a tiny implantable sensor is a reasonable way to keep track of a grandparent who may be experiencing dementia. In "Forever Young," they discuss how nanomedicine could greatly expand life expectancy while creating a detailed record of individuals' health indicators. In "Clean, Green and Unseen," panelists look at the allure and the unknowns surrounding promising new consumer products and environmental applications......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

March 31, 2008, 8:12 PM CT

First 'active matrix' display using nanowires

Engineers have created the first "active matrix" display using a new class of transparent transistors and circuits, a step toward realizing applications such as e-paper, flexible color monitors and "heads-up" displays in car windshields.

The transistors are made of "nanowires," tiny cylindrical structures that are assembled on glass or thin films of flexible plastic. The scientists used nanowires as small as 20 nanometers - a thousand times thinner than a human hair - to create a display containing organic light emitting diodes, or OLEDS. The OLEDS are devices that rival the brightness of conventional pixels in flat-panel television sets, computer monitors and displays in consumer electronics.

"This is a step toward demonstrating the practical potential of nanowire transistors in displays and for other applications," said David Janes, a researcher at Purdue University's Birck Nanotechnology Center and a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The nanowires were used to create a proof-of-concept active-matrix display similar to those in television sets and computer monitors. An active-matrix display is able to precisely direct the flow of electricity to produce video because each picture element, or pixel, possesses its own control circuitry......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

March 24, 2008, 8:04 PM CT

Students making the grade online, in class

The lives of todays college students have always included computers and the Internet. That technology now has moved from the ether into instruction.

A technical report from a University of Houston Department of Health and Human Performance researcher finds that students in a hybrid class that incorporated instructional technology with in-class lectures scored a letter-grade higher on average than their counterparts who took the same class in a more traditional format.

Brian McFarlin measured the student involvement and academic performance of a traditional classKinesiology 3306from fall 2004 to fall 2005. He compared those measurements with those of students in the hybrid class, offered as an alternative from summer 2006 to fall 2007.

One reason we offered the hybrid class in the first place was because students said they wanted it, said McFarlin, a researcher and assistant professor. Their formal evaluations of the class indicated the traditional class didnt take advantage of instructional technologies available, and that these technologies could give them additional help and access to course material outside of class time.

Hybrid classes are growing in popularity and practicality for students and professors, at UH and on campuses across the country, because of the presentation of material and the accessibility and flexibility to students. For example, an upper-level business law and ethics class in the UH Bauer College of Business reaches more than 1,000 students each academic year because of its flexible, hybrid offerings......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

March 18, 2008, 8:44 PM CT

Tiny Torrents

Engineers harnessing the same physical property that drives silent household air purifiers have created a miniaturized device that is now ready for testing as a silent, ultra-thin, low-power and low maintenance cooling system for laptop computers and other electronic devices.

The compact, solid-state fan, developed with support from NSF's Small Business Innovation Research program, is the most powerful and energy efficient fan of its size. It produces three times the flow rate of a typical small mechanical fan and is one-fourth the size.

Dan Schlitz and Vishal Singhal of Thorrn Micro Technologies, Inc., of Marietta, Ga. will present their RSD5 solid-state fan at the 24th Annual Semiconductor Thermal Measurement, Modeling and Management Symposium (Semi-Therm) in San Jose, Calif., on March 17, 2008. The device is the culmination of six years of research that began while the scientists were NSF-supported graduate students at Purdue University.

"The RSD5 is one of the most significant advancements in electronics cooling since heat pipes. It could change the cooling paradigm for mobile electronics," said Singhal.

The RSD5 incorporates a series of live wires that generate a micro-scale plasma (an ion-rich gas that has free electrons that conduct electricity). The wires lie within un-charged conducting plates that are contoured into half-cylindrical shape to partially envelop the wires......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 22:52:49 GMT

Spam Over IM Hits Skype

Dameon over at the VOIP blog has an interesting post about spam via IM on Skype. Users receive an IM from some with a sexy name and picture asks to be added to your contact list. Of course it isn't really a beautiful woman or handsome man wanting to get to know you-it's a spammer, or more likely a spam bot, and if you comply, you're in for a barrage of spam, porn or worse. Protecting yourself is easy-block messages from anyone who isn't on your contact list.

Spam over IM is far from new. Anyone who has AOL's instant messaging service has experienced being spammed over it at least once. Spammers use bots to send out huge amounts of IM's. The same technique is used in chat rooms-most often to promote dating and porn sites. Seems like they've now moved on to Skype.

Read this informative post on the Skype Journal to read more about this technique and how to protect yourself and your users from it. Posted by: Sue Walsh      Read more     Source

March 11, 2008, 5:35 AM CT

China's Carbon Dioxide Emissions

The growth in China's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is far outpacing prior estimates, making the goal of stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gases much more difficult, as per a new analysis by economists at the University of California, Berkeley, and UC San Diego.

Prior estimates, including those used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, say the region that includes China will see a 2.5 to 5 percent annual increase in CO2 emissions, the largest contributor to atmospheric greenhouse gases, between 2004 and 2010. The new UC analysis puts that annual growth rate for China to at least 11 percent for the same time period.

The study is scheduled for print publication in the recent issue of the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, but is now online.

The researchers' most conservative forecast predicts that by 2010, there will be an increase of 600 million metric tons of carbon emissions in China over the country's levels in 2000. This growth from China alone would dramatically overshadow the 116 million metric tons of carbon emissions reductions pledged by all the developed countries in the Kyoto Protocol. (The protocol was never ratified in the United States, which was the largest single emitter of carbon dioxide until 2006, when China took over that distinction, as per numerous reports.)......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source

March 11, 2008, 5:00 AM CT

US stands to lose a generation of young researchers

Five consecutive years of flat funding the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is deterring promising young scientists and threatening the future of Americans health, a group of seven preeminent academic research institutions warned today. In a new report released here, the group of concerned institutions (six research universities and a major teaching hospital) described the toll that cumulative stagnant NIH funding is taking on the American medical research enterprise. And the leading institutions warned that if NIH does not get consistent and robust support in the future, the nation will lose a generation of young researchers to other careers and other countries and, with them, a generation of promising research that could cure disease for millions for whom no cure currently exists.

The report, A Broken Pipeline" Flat Funding of the NIH Puts a Generation of Science at Risk, was co-authored by Brown University, Duke University, Harvard University, The Ohio State University, Partners Healthcare, the University of California Los Angeles, and Vanderbilt University.

It profiles 12 junior scientists from institutions across the country who, despite their exceptional qualifications and noteworthy research, attest to the funding difficulties that they and their professional peers are experiencing. These scientists are devising new ways to manipulate stem cells to repair the heart, revealing critical pathways involved in cancer and brain diseases, and using new technologies to diagnose and treat kidney disease......... Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source